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Comment by Obsnold | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps someone here can give me a bit of advice. I've been undecided on whether to buy a refurbished workstation for a while now. I do a lot of aosp builds for some of my clients and on my current setup it can take 3 or 4 hours for a clean build. I've been looking at various builds on https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ For about £1500 to £2000. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be greatly appreciated.

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My favourite setup is an HPz620 v2 with e5-xxxxv2 CPUs, and >= 64 gigs of ram.

Basically any workstation with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2, or the L variant (lower power) will do.

for example:

1 x HP Z620 Grade A - 800W - V2

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 95W)

1 x HP Z420, Z620 - Heatsink

1 x HP Z620 2nd CPU Riser Board, Fan & Heatsink

8 x 8GB - DDR3L 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R, 2RX4, ECC REG)

1 x 2TB - SATA (7.2K, 3G) HDD - Major Brand

You'll need a new graphics card and an SSD, but that is £750 inc vat. this means you can spend £500 on an nvidia RTX, and get a 6k monitor.

Thanks I've found it difficult to find any info on what I can expect for certain hardware. It seems most people are either hobbyists who are on similar hardware to me or people working for big companies who can afford massive build servers.

If you’re ok with a mobile workstation, i grabbed a refurbished P52 on ebay. They go up to xeon (6 core) and you can stuff a ton of ram in there. You can’t get one if these models without a quadro video card unfortunately so that does mark up the price, but it should be useful for running the emulator. And lastly an Nvme SSD - if you have all those it should work well, but i cant comment on the thermal longevity as to whether it might throttle during a long build as it’s been many years since ive done a AOSP build or anything that heavy. I got mine for 1800ish USD but i added some ram on top. It was definitely overkill for what I do, but I think it would suit your case well.

Hmm I hadn't thought of a mobile workstation I'll give them a look. I used to have a Dell mobile workstation in one of my previous jobs which put me off them a bit because it weighed a ton and was a pain to carry around but the p52 looks quite interesting.

> I do a lot of aosp builds for some of my clients

If you don't mind - what kind of job are you in that you can do AOSP professionally? I always saw that as a pure-hobbyist thing.

I do embedded software engineering for IOT companies at the moment. Usually I get a zip file filled with all the sources from some random design house in China and then have to pull out all the rubbish and configure it for my clients needs.

Hello! I manage this website - here to help if you have any questions RE benchmarking, compatibility, limitations etc.

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